


all of my life, you've always been

by aceofdiamonds



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, POV Second Person, the death is only implied not explicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 21:00:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/841333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aceofdiamonds/pseuds/aceofdiamonds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>what if harry died to win the war?</p>
            </blockquote>





	all of my life, you've always been

**Author's Note:**

> this is something i couldn't stop thinking about. it's experimental and slightly pretentious and it's 10 words short of a clean 1000.

you feel it happen, you're sure of it. you're locked in a duel with dolohov and then you're frozen to the spot. you would've died had it not been for dean thomas leaping forward and sending over a beautiful stun. you cant thank him for your heart hurts, your chest tight, and then you swear you can hear you heart rip, hear your body breaking and destroying itself. you think you know this is it but you hope and pray you're wrong. you've never believed in a higher power; it feels unbecoming to start now, but you pray and you make promise after promise if it will keep him alive. 

you know it's over when there's that awful booming voice that gets right inside you, controlling and dark and wrongly filling the empty spaces you have now half your heart is gone. he tells you the words that make you throw up in an empty corner of the ruined castle and then you're running and running and there's the body and then you're screaming and screaming and people are looking at you with sympathy and tears in their eyes and you don't care. you don't care. 

you double your efforts in the final battle, fighting for him more than anything, him above fred and remus and tonks and colin and it doesn't feel wrong because you think when he died a part of you did too; more than a part, more than a limb -- your heart is gone. 

you say avada kedavra again and again only hitting one of your targets and feeling like you've failed him by hitting one instead of missing ten. 

you feel numb and cold and tired and breathless and scared and unfeeling all at once. you sit in the front pew of the crowded funeral -- the funeral that is both reported and hushed up with so many respects and tears shed that yours feel worthless, and so you don't cry and you don't talk and you avoid the looks ron and hermione send you like you're a time bomb waiting to explode. 

you hide away for eighteen months, shaming your mother by sleeping around and littering your room with bottles of firewhiskey that don't help anything at all. you shout and swear and refuse to use magic for eighteen months and then -- the sky doesn't clear, it doesn't get better right away but you stop fucking the first person you meet and you start apologising to your family one little word at a time and you pull out your wand from under your bed, trying simple spells at first and you begin to see that maybe things will not feel so jagged and new and broken forever. 

you get a job as a nurse at the bottom of the ladder in st. mungos and you work your way up through the ranks, thinking to yourself all the time that this is what he would want -- he was always helping others, sacrificing himself time and time again for the safety of everybody else -- and maybe you feel on his wavelength again doing this, like healing people is giving you a way of being closer to him, earning his approval like you have been wanting since you were nine and held your mother's hand as she helped him find his way onto the platform.

you meet someone -- a healer from the department of spell damage two floors above you. he tells you stories from his ward, some that make you laugh and some that make your heart clench as you remember the damage from the war, the damage people are still paying for. he is funny and kind and everyone says he's a catch and maybe he is but you know you're looking at his messy black hair that won't lie flat and his green eyes that don't flash with quite so much emotion as the ones you were used to. you wonder for a second, in the middle of a date with this lovely man, what colour his eyes were when voldemort -- you say his name now; when you've lost the peron you care about most you lose fear in everything else -- said those magic words -- were they dark with fear and anger. or were they -- no, he had accepted his death, he had sacrificed himself for you and everyone else, and so they would be emerald, shiny and alight, his guard down once and for all in his final moment. you wonder what he was thinking of in that final moment. not for the first time not for the last time you hope he was thinking of you.

but back to this date, the date that's going well despite you not being all there. he's forgiving and patient and he pays your half of the bill which is something he would do if they had been given the chance to do it properly and so you pretend it's hayfever and allow your eyes to get wet. he's so lovely he doesn't point out that it's december. 

you get married to this lovely, wonderful man and you have hermione as your bridesmaid and he has someone from work as his best man and no one thinks how sad it is that it should have been ron up there beside his best friend, the golden trio plus you in an event that's been planned since you were six.

you have three children and when you suggest harry as a middle name for your son -- a first name would be too much -- you pretend you don't see the look that flashes across your husband's eyes, the look that tells you he doesn't know how to live up to the ghost of the saviour of the wizarding world and you pretend he's being silly and you pretend you love him and you pretend and pretend and pretend


End file.
